How true! A lot of people seem to miss out on the essence of the debate being contained in the very name of what is being discussed, ebooks. Not only does that tell us that the basic difference lies in the delivery mechanism, but you can support that assertion by examining the nature of the product: books are frequently published in both print and electronically, and those that aren't can be. This isn't about books being replaced by websites, or some other radically different form of expression, it is about print books being replaced by electronic books.

That said, I also believe that the death of print books is going to be a long one. We have already witnessed the virtual death of certain classes of books, such as indicies and directories, and are witnessing the virtual death of other classes of books, such as novels. Others types of books will follow when both the technology and consumer are ready, but not until then.

Also notice that I said virtual death. Books aren't going to die off in the way that records, 8-tracks, and audio cassettes did. It will probably tail off in a manner much more similar to live performance: they will become secondary, but they won't disappear. Books have been a part of our culture for far too long to simply vanish, unlike various audio recording media which are here one decade and gone the next. How we regard print books and how we treat them is often more important than the inherent advantages of ebooks. That print book with a hand written inscription is going to be a more valuable gift to most people than an ebook with a long lost email. The memories that you contained in that well worn volume are going to be more meaningful than those provided by an electronic file that you kept from a long discarded ereader, tablet, or computer. I suspect that people will always feel more comfortable with friends or strangers browsing their bookshelves than files on their ereader. The point isn't that people will want to have print versions of every book that touched their life in some manner. The point is that many people will want to keep the books that touched their life in a significant manner, and that will keep print alive for many decades if not centuries.